Eastern Michigan UniversityDigitalCommons@EMU
Senior Honors Theses Honors College
2013
Chthonic Powers: T.S. Eliot and H.P. LovecraftCharles Elliott
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Recommended CitationElliott, Charles, "Chthonic Powers: T.S. Eliot and H.P. Lovecraft" (2013). Senior Honors Theses. 354.http://commons.emich.edu/honors/354
Chthonic Powers: T.S. Eliot and H.P. Lovecraft
Degree TypeOpen Access Senior Honors Thesis
DepartmentEnglish Language and Literature
First AdvisorElisabeth Daumer
Subject CategoriesEnglish Language and Literature
This open access senior honors thesis is available at DigitalCommons@EMU: http://commons.emich.edu/honors/354
CHTHONIC POWERS: T.S. ELIOT AND H.P. LOVECRAFT
By
Charles Elliott
A Senior Thesis Submitted to the
Eastem Michigan University
Honors College
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation
with Honors in English Language and Literature
Approved at Y psilauti, Michigan, on this date Q'\ l ·, \ l .,_, , 'L.Q \~
Elliott 1
Contents
Introduction: Two Men Out of Modernity ......... 2
Different Voices and Other Gods ....................... g
The Cosmic Shore ............................................. 30
Abbreviations
CC: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, H.P. Lovecraft
CPP: The Complete Poems and Plays, T.S. Eliot
LVW: Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, H.P. Lovecraft
MW: Miscellaneous Writings, H.P. Lovecraft
NCE: The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism (Norton Critical
Edition)'
SP: Selected Prose ofT.S. Eliot
WLF: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts
1 The Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land contains a variety of source texts, essays, and annotations which I make use of; rather than citing these individually I will in simply cite NCE along with the appropriate page number
Elliott 2
Introduction: Two Men out of Modernity
The primary aim of the present study is to demonstrate a particular cultural
phenomenon: that of two writers of far removed literary circles nonetheless
demonstrating a kinship of sensibility and aesthetic material in their works. One of
these men is Howard Philips Lovecraft, a pulp science fiction author and amateur
journalist, the other is Thomas Stearns Eliot, a modernist poet. That they were far
removed from one another in life and readership there can be no doubt. Certainly the
differences in the two men's society divide them: Lovecraft missed out on formal higher
education and participated in the amateur press, while Eliot attended Harvard and
become a recognized poet. Likewise, Lovecraft purported to have become skeptical of
the existence of god prior to the age of five (MW 533) and remained an atheist for the
whole of his life, while for Eliot religion was of prime importance. Yet these differences
notwithstanding, there are a number of parallels in their lives and writings. Born only
two years apart, Lovecraft in 1890 and Eliot in 1888, both trace their lineage to old New
England families (L VW 4; Ackroyd 15), and it was in 1917, the year Prufrock and Other
Observations was published, that Lovecraft began producing the nearly continuous
stream of short fiction which lasted until his death. As such, these authors' most
productive periods appear in near-alignment, writing at the same time, at roughly the
same age. That they were both influenced in a manner by the French Symbolist
movement unites them further, supplying their writing with a common reservoir of
symbols and images from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur
Rimbaud. Keeping all of these similarities in mind, I will demonstrate the manner in
which Eliot and Lovecraft, contemporaries as they were in time and born of a common
literary and cultural heritage, occupied a similarly common imaginative space. Upon
Elliott 3
investigation, seemingly drastically divergent texts as the modern poem The Waste
Land and the pulp-prose "The Call of Cthulhu" appear as different configurations of
kindred experience. Eliot's often stark verse bears more closely to the present and the
real, but never without inclination towards the mythic and cosmic which characterizes
Lovecraft. Lines of Eliot's writing could very easily be adapted as titles for Lovecraft's
tales; while Eliot's "Prufrock" asks whether he might dare to "disturb the universe" (46),
so many of Lovecraft's protagonists find themselves in the midst of its disruption.
It was in a 1951 essay by Eliot on the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, to whom he
and Lovecraft both owed much, that Eliot contemplated that,
the indefinite elaboration of scientific discovery and invention, and of political
and social machinery, may reach a point at which there will be an irresistible
revulsion of humanity and a readiness to accept the most primitive hardships
rather than carry any longer the burden of modern civilization. ("From Poe" 342)
This hypothesis, albeit followed by the qualification that he held "no fixed opinion" on it,
reflects almost identically the sentiment professed by the narrator of Lovecraft's "The
Call of Cthulhu" in the story's first paragraph:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little;
but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifYing vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety
of a new dark age. ( CC 139)
This mutual imagining, if purely fictitious or speculative, highlights their arrival at a
common understanding of the place and nature of humanity. By examining their texts in
tandem we are able to understand these authors in a somewhat unconventional, but
Elliott 4
ultimately revealing manner. In regards to Eliot, for example, I will demonstrate the
presence and significance in his writing of strange gods, as well as a cosmic perspective
that is easily overlooked. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, this reading demonstrates
the manner in which his writing was as distinctly a response to modernity as that of
anyone we might call a "Modernist." In this the present study is but a part of a greater
attempt to recognize and understand what exactly that artistic movement was, for as any
cultural movement its beginning, end, and character are not definite: all we may say in
any certain terms is that it happened.
Towards the development of modernist art Lovecraft is often abrasive, in one
essay stating that "the aesthetic generation of T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce,
Ben Hecht, Aldous Huxley, James Branch Cabell, and all the rest ... knowing that life has
no real pattern, either rave, or mock, or join in the cosmic chaos by exploiting a frank
and conscious unintelligibility and confusion of values" (MW no). Indeed, towards Eliot
he was especially incredulous: while vocally critical of many modes of Modernism, it was
The Waste Land that so bothered him as to move him to parody, producing "The Waste
Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance" (Ancient 252). Yet he in turn displays a
certain respect for such works: in 1924, two years after producing this satire, he called
Joyce's Ulysses a "significant [contribution] to contemporary art" (MW 242). That
Lovecraft exhibited such a dramatic ambivalence towards the traditional modernist
canon in his own work while sharing its thematic concerns and material makes him an
ideal subject through which to study the development of modern literature. As Edmund
Wilson states in Axel's Castle, one of the first works to identify this movement,
one must guard against giving the impression that these movements and counter
movements necessarily follow one another in a punctual and well-generalled
Elliott 5
fashion ... one set of methods and ideas is not completely superseded by another;
but that, on the contrary, it thrives in its teeth-so that, on the one hand,
Flaubert's prose has learned to hear, see and feel with delicate senses of
Romanticism at the same time that Flaubert is disciplining and criticizing the
Romantic temperament[.] (10-11).
No author, then, may be seen as the embodiment of a movement, so much as working
independently within its context. Thus in considering Lovecraft here I am looking at him
as a member of the same context as Eliot, and by so doing attempting to identify the
character of this context. In the broadest sense of my discussion this context is
modernity, but in particular respects it may be more specific, such as the Massachusetts
coast, reading of anthropological texts, or literary heritage.
Regarding heritage, perhaps the foremost mutual influence lies in the figure of
Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft was greatly influenced by Poe, devoting a chapter to him in
his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," in which he traces the history of"a
literature of cosmic fear" (27). This section he begins adamantly: "In the eighteen
thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale,
but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a
great European aesthetic school" (54).The school referred to is, undoubtedly, the French
Symbolist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, the influence of which was central
to Wilson's examination in Axel's Castle. In this work as well Poe's foundational role is
emphasized, with Wilson calling his critical writings "the first scriptures of the
Symbolist Movement" (12). The Symbolists, and the subsequent Decadents, played a
well-documented role in the development of several prominent modernist writers, and
Elliott 6
were highly regarded by Lovecraft as well, who in his story "The Hound" established
their writing as an impetuous towards morbid exploration:
The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies ofthe pre-Raphaelites all were
ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting
novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the Decadents could hold us,
and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of
our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till
finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal
experiences and adventures. ( CC 81)
Thus in this regard Lovecraft was drawing on the same literary influences as Eliot, who
included verbatim lines of such poets as Baudelaire and Lafargue in some of his most
prominent poetry. While this particular commonality will not be discussed in depth
here, it is a significant one, also enmeshing Lovecraft with other prominent modernist
figures such as W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.
It is important to note here that while I will look primarily at his prose, Lovecraft
did, in fact, write a considerable amount of verse. This work was largely conventional in
form, unlike that of Eliot, as Lovecraft advocated an adherence to metrical regularity
(MW 205). His efforts in this area he regarded with doubt himself, writing in 1921 of his
early attempts published in amateur journals,
I unfortunately possessed the delusion that I could write verse; a delusion which
caused me to alienate my readers by means of many long and execrably dull
metrical inflictions. An old-fashioned style at present out of favour added to the
completeness of my failure (MW 451)
Elliott 7
What is interesting to note here is that although his method of writing poetry varied
wildly from that of Eliot, his justification for this method aligns very well with Eliot's
own understanding of meter. In his 1915 essay on "Metrical Regularity," Lovecraft
justifies his adherence to established forms of verse by invoking scientific knowledge:
Science can likewise trace the metrical instinct from the very infancy of mankind,
or even beyond, to the pre-human age of the apes. Nature is in itself an unending
succession of regular impulses. The steady recurrence of the seasons and of the
moonlight, the coming and going of the day, the ebb and flow ofthe tides, the
beating of the heart and pulses, the tread of the feet in walking, and countless
other phenomena of regularity, have all combined to inculcate in the human
brain a rhytllmic sense which is manifest in the most uncultivated, as in the most
polished of peoples. (MW 205)
The idea of an inherent "rhythmic sense" as he illustrates it here was similarly arrived at
by Eliot, who utilized scientific knowledge in his thought as well. In a 1923 essay titled
"The Beating of a Drum," Eliot advises literary critics to study "such books as 'The
Origin of Species' itself, and 'Ancient Law,' and 'Primitive Culture"' and proceeds to
hypothesize ilie use of such texts in understanding the qualities of archetypes such as, in
this case, the Fool in Elizabethan drama. His argument here is largely Darwinian in
origin, following "the theory of the development of tragedy and comedy out of a
common form,'' on the basis of which he reconsiders "such abstractions" of civilization
(11). He argues that superseding the abstractions of form is an essential rhythm,
identified by Aristotle as the common element of poetry, music, and dancing (12). This
conception of rhythm, existing prior to the form which embodies it, Eliot illustrates: "an
unoccupied person, finding a drum, may be seized with a desire to beat it; but unless he
Elliott 8
is an imbecile he will be unable to continue beating it ... without finding a reason for so
doing" (12). This image of a primitive person beating a drum is echoed in Lovecraft's
earlier essay, where he wrote that "Savages shew [the metric sense] in its simplest form
while dancing to the sound of primitive drums" (MW 205). Thus we see that although
they utilized their understanding of it in very different ways, the two authors shared a
conception of an inherent rhythm which precedes form.
It would seem then that Lovecraft's adherence to metrical regularity was based
upon his own classicist perspective. In a 1914 letter he writes that he "[ o ]nee privately
tried imitations of modern poets, but turned away in distaste. Their vocabulary and
technic alike seem utterly strange to an ancient like myself' (L VW 65). Although setting
himself opposite the modern poets, his classicist inclination further solidifies his
similitude to T.S. Eliot. For Eliot too was a classicist, most dramatically declaring so in
1929 when he wrote that he was a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo
catholic in religion" (Ackroyd 174). Perhaps one ofthe most important essays of his
career was, in fact, his 1919 "Tradition and the Individual Talent," wherein he argued
that a man is compelled to write "with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (SP 38). That Lovecraft
shared a similar conception may be evidenced in a 1923 essay in which he criticizes
those "steeped in the orthodox English literature of the middle nineteenth century
rather than immersed in the universal stream which knows neither time nor country"
(MW 236). In both of these formulations there is conceived an order to literature which
transcends a single, present generation. Here I would note that it is conceivable that
Lovecraft may have arrived at this idea through Eliot, although there is no evidence that
Elliott 9
he read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and may well have come to it of his own
formulation.
Interestingly, in his study The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B.
Yeats, and the Occult, Leon Surette connects Eliot's conception of tradition with "occult
notions of a secret tradition," in that it maintains a tradition which subsists
"independently of official institutions and dogmas" by way of individuals (38). This is
particularly significant in that although neither Lovecraft nor Eliot participated in the
occult, both utilized it to some degree in their imaginative work. If, as Surette argues,
the occult influence played a defining role in conceiving the character of modernist
writing, then it would follow that Lovecraft fell just as much in line with it as T.S. Eliot.
The presence of the occult in their writing will become all the more relevant in the
following section, wherein it will play a key role in my comparison of Eliot's 1922 The
Waste Land and Lovecraft's 1926 "The Call ofCthulhu," two of the authors' most
recognized works. These texts, read in tandem, provide a compelling view of how the
two authors experienced modernity and how they coped with it in literature. We
discover a concern particularly with the strange, which for both is manifested
imaginatively out of mythical material.
Different Voices and Other Gods
It is telling that in his criticism ofT.S. Eliot's landmark poem The Waste Land
Lovecraft called it "a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions,
quotations, slang, and scraps in general" (MW 233), for it was a collection of "scraps in
general" that would make up the text of his own 1926 short story "The Call of Cthulhu."
This text, featuring easily the most popularized of Lovecraft's imaginings, is in fact
Elliott 10
atypical of his work in terms of narrative structure. The story is related in the first
person by Francis Wayland Thurston, who takes almost no role in the narrative action,
instead relating to the reader various documents, artifacts, and accounts associated with
the "CTHULHU CULT" which his deceased uncle, Professor George Angell, had
researched privately prior to his mysterious death; the death of this 92 year old
"authority on ancient inscriptions" is markedly unattributable to any visible disorder
(140). The assorted fragments inform the reader in the first part of the story ofthe
production of an ancient bas-relief by a contemporary artist accompanied by an
eruption of strange dreams the world over; in the second part of the arrival of a strange
idol at a meeting of the fictional "American Archaeological Society" seventeen years
earlier and the recollections shared there; and in the third and final part of the
disastrous voyage of a group of sailors. AB such the story is not bound to one particular
setting or character but through these fragments invokes such diverse locales as New
Orleans, New Zealand, Greenland, and Lovecraft's native Rhode Island. This
fragmentation of narrative is not simply a device to allow for use of such diverse regions,
but is integral to how the story is to be understood. It begins, "[t]he most merciful thing
in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We
live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far" (139). Thus, from the start, the story is concerned with
incomprehensibility and the finiteness of the individual perception. In this the tale
resembles T.S. Eliot's "scraps," where he adopted the "Voices of Society" rather than a
single individual (NCE 72). This is made all the more evident by the earlier title of The
Waste Land, "He Do the Police in Different Voices," adapted from Dickens' Our Mutual
Friend, a novel which presents the reader with disparate London lives that gradually
Elliott 11
cohere. The incoherent and incomprehensible are essential to both texts, and it is in
their common significance, as well as in the scraps they share, that a comparison of the
two begins to become viable.
Similar to the manner in which Lovecraft locates his narrator in his native city of
Providence, Eliot makes London central to his poem. The city is evoked either by
reference to specific landmarks or the use of native dialect in each part of the work
excepting part IV, "Death By Water," the shortest segment of the poem. In "The Burial
of the Dead," for example, Eliot writes that "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A
crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many" (61-62) and in "The Fire Sermon" the
speaker apostrophizes "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" (176). Through
allusions such as these, he establishes London as a central space of the poem, even while
the whole is disparate, containing references to events, places, or myths far removed in
time and space. Thus both authors use a city they had lived in and known intimately as
the space from which textual disparity is presented. This is not to say, necessarily, that
in either case the respective cities serve a unifying function in themselves. Although
Lovecraft's narrator is situated in Providence, the city's particular atmosphere does not
enter into this text and could be exchanged for any university town. Eliot's use of
London in The Waste Land is of more significance, but the lines which evoke it are no
less fragmentary than any other portion of the poem. London is an impmtant space for
the work, and it could very well be argued that it is the primary space, but it is not
removed from the "scraps" and does not serve any framing function. These cities of
great importance to their authors are incorporated into their fragmentary texts, but only
as relative spaces among others. If there is unification present in either text, it is in how
their respective fragments are read. In this the fact that both works share common
sources for their fragments is of the utmost relevance and further suggests the
importance of a linked reading.
Elliott 12
In introducing his notes on The Waste Land Eliot directs the reader to two source
texts in particular: Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The
Golden Bough. These are both referred to by him as works of anthropology, but what is
significant about them in particular is their concern with the origins of ritual and myth.
While The Golden Bough, a landmark work, offered a euhemeristic elucidation of
religion, rooting its myths and rituals in the acts ofthe natural world (NCB 30),
Weston's book is a more curious case. In his The Birth of Modernism, Surette evidences
that Weston's study, while scholarly in execution, was based in a belief in the occult,
notably drawing upon the thought of theosophist G.R.S. Mead (234-235). Unlike
Frazer's study, which bases myth in the material world, From Ritual to Romance is
based on the "hypothesis" as Surette explains it, "of a wisdom secretly maintained from
remote antiquity by societies and enlightened individuals" (234). He shows that of this
understanding there can be little doubt, citing Weston's participation in the
theosophical "Quest Society" lectures (233) and a claim made in an her earlier work The
Quest of the Holy Grail that "readers of romances, unacquainted with the Grail
literature in general but familiar with 'occult' tradition and practices, should invariably
detect this [initiation] element in the story" (240). Eliot's selection ofthese two works as
elucidative sources for the reader of his poem is echoed in Lovecraft's story. In this case
the narrator finds among the papers of his late uncle "references to passages in such
mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss
Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe" (142). The latter of these is, like Weston's text,
a scholarly work which claimed the existence of an occult tradition. In this case the
Elliott 13
tradition is that of an underground witch-cult that had its origin in a pre-Aryan race.
S.T. Joshi notes that this text is "regarded by modern scholars as highly unlikely," but
was received by the author with enthusiasm, as it "perfectly meshed with some of
Lovecraft's own literary tropes" (CC 385). Just as Eliot in his notes shares two works of
anthropology, one The Golden Bough and the other mixing the subject with the occult,
as elucidative of his fragmentary text, Lovecraft does so for his narrator.
In Lovecraft's case, the significance of the occult element is readily apparent: the
idea of a secret tradition, which may only be understood by the initiated forms the basis
for his own Cthulhu cult. In one passage an incarcerated member of the cult describes
the cult's origin:
those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed
them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars;. That cult would never die till
the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from
His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. (155)
The narrative action of Lovecraft's story is centered on that point when "the stars came
right again" and imaginative minds the world over were visited by visions, the "call"
signified in the story's title. In Eliot's case, however, the significance of the occult is less
clear. Leon Surette notes that the significance of From Ritual to Romance has proved
problematic to critics of The Waste Land, writing that "[t]he mainstream critical
consensus, then, has underplayed Weston's relevance to the poem even in the face of
Eliot's headnote" (236). He attributes this in part to a lack of understanding of the
theosophical nature of Weston's text, which led scholars to accept it as "a standard
folkloric study belonging to the Frazer school" (234). In his own assessment, Surette
hypothesizes that "Weston's arguments for a lost mystery religion- like the Grail legend
Elliott 14
itself and the tarot pack- provided Eliot with a framework that was as factitious as the
Odyssey was for Joyce's Ulysses" (274). He writes that due to Weston's regard ofthe
Grail legend as an exoteric representation of an initiation rite,
we do not need to choose between a Grail motif and an initiation motif, but can
see them as exoteric and esoteric aspects of the same sacred mystery - a mystery,
moreover, which Weston tells us is not known to the authors ofthe Grail stories
and therefore need not be known to the author of The Waste Land either. (269)
Thus, if we are to imagine Eliot's use of the Grail legend by way of From Ritual to
Romance as analogous to Joyce's use of The Odyssey in Ulysses, then the unknown
esoteric portent of the deliberately fragmented and exoteric poem may be seen as
playing a unifying role. This conception of the poem would then impart a similar
framework to that of "Cthulhu," where the fragments discovered by the narrator
exoterically develop into an understanding of an esoteric event.
There can also be exhibited a parallel narrative function of the esoteric, in that
both texts introduce a portent of doomed sailors in their first part by way of a vision.
Eliot introduces "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante" (43) in "The Burial of the
Dead," wherein she declares "Here, said she, / Is your card, the drowned Phoenician
Sailor" (46-47), anticipating the scene of the fourth part ofthe poem which describes
"Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead" (312). Lovecraft, on his part, introduces as
the inciting incident of Professor George Angell's investigations a contemporary artist
who produces a seemingly ancient bas-relief during a dream of
great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with
green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls
Elliott 15
and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was
not a voice[.] (143)
The city referred to here is later revealed to be "R'lyeh" (155), risen from the ocean floor,
upon which a group of unknowing sailors find themselves in the final part of the story,
"The Madness from the Sea," and the "voice that was not a voice" is that of Cthulhu, the
strange god they encounter there. Thus in "Cthulhu" the significance of the vision is
clear, but to have an idea of such significance in the case of The Waste Land we must
recourse to Ezra Pound's editing. Pound advised Eliot to remove the bulk of "Death By
Water" but asserted: "Phlebas is an integral part ofthe poem; the card pack introduces
him, tbe drowned phoen. sailor. And he is needed ABSOlootly where he is" (WLF 129).
That Eliot followed this counsel suggests that he agreed with Pound's reasoning. In both
cases the initial vision is integral, forming the basis for later textual events.
There is no reason to believe that either Eliot or Lovecraft believed in occult
concepts to any degree, with Eliot's conversion to the Anglican church isolating him
from such belief (240) and Lovecraft thoroughly considering himself an atheist and a
mechanistic materialist (MW 129). They each, it seems, utilized theosophical thought to
depict their respective conceptions of modern reality. As Surette concludes,
Weston provided Eliot with a framework that permitted the interpenetration and
overlap of Christian, classical, and medieval legendary material in an 'ordered' if
not orderly manner - which interpenetration yields a rhetorical structure that
mimes the confused spiritual state of modern man and (most probably) of the
author of The Waste Land. (278)
Even were we to take Surette's argument for naught, and suggest tbat Eliot read Weston
without knowledge or acknowledgement of her theosophical thought, it remains that
Elliott 16
The Waste Land was received as esoteric in nature by readers. One early essay on the
poem is titled "The Esotericism ofT.S. Eliot" (North 156), but not for any perceived
involvement with the occult: "the esotericism of'The Waste Land' is different: it is
deliberate mystification. For the structure of the poem is loose: it is full of interstices"
(157). Another early review states that "only the pundit, the pedant, or the clairvoyant"
will be aware of the poem's "meaning, plan, and intention" (156). In and of itself, The
Waste Land garnered a reputation of being esoteric; even were it not for Eliot's
reference to Weston's book as a hermeneutic device, the poem's fragmented form
marked it as such.
The conception of a unified meaning esoterically hidden behind the exoteric was
not exclusive to the occult, though, and was perhaps representative of a more
widespread fantasy. That From Ritual and Romance and The Witch-Cult in Western
Europe were presented as serious anthropological studies is at first striking, but in
looking closely at the methodology of the Frazer's The Golden Bough it becomes
apparent that the two subjects were at this time highly compatible. In her essay "The
Case of the Missing Abstraction: Eliot, Frazer, and Modernism," Jewel Spears Brooker
explains that Frazer "was one of those scientists who extended Darwin's thesis
(evolution) and Darwin's method (comparative study of fragments) into the social
sciences" (544). As such, Darwin's concept of a common ancestor for humanity becomes
transmuted into "a common ancestor for all religions." In neither the case is this
ancestor present or readily apparent. Brooker explains that
Just as the common parent of the human species exists only as an abstraction,
only as an intellectual construction built up from surviving fragments changed in
the process of evolution, the common parent myth exists only as an abstraction.
Elliott 17
If one should find widely scattered fragments of pottery ... he would be led to
realize the whole, the original, as an abstraction. (547-548)
This anthropological process of constructing a parent myth as an abstraction is nearly
identical to the search for an esoteric truth by an occultist. Indeed, when read in tandem
with Surette's summation that "[t]he occult scholar is typically engaged in an effort to
recover an ancient wisdom that survives only in scattered fragments and in the practice
of marginalized or secret societies" (50) it seems inevitable that these two
contemporaneous bodies of knowledge would intermix as they did in the texts cited by
Eliot and Lovecraft.
What is more, Brooker connects Frazer's methodology, of identifYing unity in an
abstraction from fragments, with what Eliot termed the "mythical method" (SP 178).
This method, elucidated after The Waste Land's publication in a 1923 review of Joyce's
Ulysses, Eliot called "a step toward making the modern world possible for art" (SP 178).
Foremost Eliot is singling out here Joyce's "parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of
appropriate styles and symbols to each division" (SP 175), but Brooker makes clear that
there has been no consensus on what exactly the import of this method is outside of
Ulysses, particularly in reference to The Waste Land (540-543). In considering Eliot's
claims that the mythical method "had the importance of a scientific discovery" and was
made possible by "Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or
serious), ethnology and The Golden Bough" she proposes that it follows from the
method of Frazer and thus
solves the chaos-unity dilemma by allowing the co-existence of surface chaos and
subsurface unity. Unity derives neither from sequence nor from abstractions
Elliott 18
shared by a culture, but from an abstraction selected by an artist and constructed
collaboratively with individual readers. (549)
This explication, when applied to The Waste Land, works almost exactly parallel to
Surette's hypothesis that Eliot utilized From Ritual to Romance in the same manner
that Joyce did the Odyssey. In either case exotericism is the primary factor, with an
implied or indirect unity arising from the work as a whole.
Lovecraft, in a similar manner to Eliot in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," identified a
method of overcoming the problem of modernity in another contemporary Irish author,
Lord Dunsany. Superficially quite different from a writer like Joyce, Dunsany was
distinctly a fantasist, imagining places, myths, and gods with made up names like
Pegiina, Skarl, and Yoharneth-Lahai (Dunsany 5). Yet in him Lovecraft saw the solution
to the problem posed by modernity just as Eliot saw it in Joyce. In his 1922 essay "Lord
Dunsany and His Work," Lovecraft writes that the fantasist
is in this way both a conservative and a modern; a conservative because he still
believes that beauty is a thing of golden rememberings and simple patterns, and a
modern because he perceives that only in arbitrarily selected fancy can we find
fixed any of the patterns of our golden rememberings (MW 105)
This statement is akin to the sentiment of Eliot in his later essay; the juxtaposition of
conservatism and modern sensibility that Lovecraft identifies in Dunsany is alike in its
substance to the "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" (SP 177)
that Eliot identifies in Ulysses. All the more important, however, is tlle method
identified by Lovecraft by which this juxtaposition is achieved. That he understands the
"arbitrarily selected fancy" to be the only way past patterns may be "fixed" in Dunsany's
writing is not only reminiscent of the occult search for a hidden tradition in the
Elliott 19
disparate, but also of the methodology of the Darwinian approach to anthropology. As
Brooker writes, "[t]he unity of The Golden Bough does not depend on the chronological
or logical arrangement of Frazer's fragments ... With minimal or no damage to his
thesis, he could rearrange them, or he could throw some out and/or add others" (549).
Likewise, just as Frazer attempted to conceive a "common parent myth" as an
abstraction, Dunsany imagined his fantasies as preceding all others. A passage from the
first pages of his 1905 book The Gods of Peg ana tells that "[b]efore there stood gods
upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested MANA-YOOD
SUSHAI" (8).
All of this considered, it appears that Lovecraft's regard for Dunsany operated
parallel to Eliot's regard for Joyce in their respective attempts at "making the modern
world possible for art." Although each incorporating very similar regard for the role of
myth and how myth may have been apprehended, they nonetheless chose highly
divergent methods: Eliot drew his explication of the "mythical method" in direct
opposition to the narrative method in which Lovecraft wrote (SP 178). Later in his essay
on Dunsany Lovecraft writes that art
will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realization that
complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire
any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of
consciousness and feign a pattern oflife common to all mankind - most naturally
the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us. (no)
Thus he takes recourse to established forms and methods by means of invented
limitations. By becoming thoroughly disillusioned, Lovecraft argues, one may enjoy
again "old ideas, atmospheres, types, situations, and lighting effects in a deft pictorial
Elliott 20
way; a way tinged with affectionate reminiscence as for fallen gods" (111). This method,
combined with "a cosmic and gently satirical realization of the true microscopic
insignificance of the man-puppets" is that by which he is able to imagine Cthulhu and
other fantastic imaginings. While Eliot in poetry is able to utilize the exoteric to imagine
with the reader the esoteric, as in The Waste Land, Lovecraft ventures to play with the
esoteric in his disillusioned imagining of it.
Yet myth as it were was indispensable to both, functioning as a substantive aspect
of their theories. This is betrayed in one instance by their common claiming of the
mytllically-minded poet Yeats as representative ofthe methods they advocate (SP 177,
MW 111), but yet more distinctly by the clear mutual importance of Homer's Odyssey to
them. While Eliot praises Joyce's use of the epic in his review, Lovecraft asserts that
throughout the work of Dunsany "one may trace the inspiration of the Odyssey" which
he notes is "of much vaster genius than its more martial antecedent, the Iliad" (105). In
both men's formulation of how to use myth in the modern age, this particular epic was
foremost in mind. A retelling of that story had, in fact, made for one of Lovecraft's first
juvenile attempts at writing, entitled "The Adventures of Ulysses; or, The New Odyssey"
(MW 450). The final section of "The Call of Cthulhu" bears a distinct resemblance to a
chapter of the epic, featuring a group of sailors who are sent off course, attacked, and
arrive on an alien island inhabited by a monstrous being. Lovecraft goes so far as to
compare his Cthulhu directly to the Cyclops encountered by Odysseus. As the sailors
attempt to escape the island, "the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like
Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops,
great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue" (168).
Elliott 21
Were it not for the editing of Ezra Pound, The Waste Land too might have
featured such a narrative as the last section of "Cthulhu." Draft versions of "Part IV.
Death by Water" were much longer than what was ultimately published, featuring a long
section which relates the story of sailors at sea who come upon a strange monument.
Just as the crew of Lovecraft's story were thrown off course by "that earthquake-born
tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's
dreams" (164), the sailors of Eliot's invention were blown off course by a gale ushered in
with "an unfamiliar gust" (59). In this instance too the gale is accompanied by horrific
dreams; the speaker recounts seeing women who sing as the sirens featured in The
Odyssey and being
Frightened beyond fear, horrified past horror, calm.
(Nothing was real) for, I thought, now, when
I like, I can wake up and end the dream. (59)
The horror of the dream cannot be avoided, however, as the following lines reveal a
strange construct in the unknown region the sailors have entered:
Something which we knew must be a dawn
A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,
A line, a white line, a long white line,
A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.
My God man theres bears on it.
Not a chance, Home and mother.
Where's a cocktail shaker, Ben, here's plenty of cracked ice.
Remember me. (61)
Elliott 22
The speaker's description of the sight is fragmentary, giving the barest impression of the
scene, noting only the wall's immenseness, color, and the markings upon it. In much the
same manner, Lovecraft's narrator observes such a fragmentary relation in the
manuscript left by the Second Mate Johansen:
instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces-surfaces too great to belong to any
thing right or proper for this earth and impious with horrible images and
hieroglyphs (165)
Another particular shared by the two narratives that must be noted is the "different
darkness" marked by Eliot's speaker, for the vault that holds Cthulhu is "black with a
darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality" and that
darkness "actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly
darkening the sun" (167). The representation of darkness is nearly identical between the
two texts, furthering the similitude suggested by their narratives. This is significant as it
highlights commonalities both in sources and in intention. For their part both writers
were ultimately indebted to Homer, but neither so without mediating influence. Eliot
disclosed that in writing this section he was "rather inspired" by the Ulysses Canto in
The Divine Comedy, in which the hero of The Odyssey tells of his last voyage, on which
he died in a storm on approaching Purgatory (WLF 128). Interestingly, in writing of this
passage in 1929 Eliot declares that it had "the quality of surprise which Poe declared to
be essential to poetry" (SP 213). For the comparison at hand this statement is significant
not only due to Lovecraft's deep admiration of Poe, but also because in describing the
darkness at the risen city of R'lyeh as a "positive quality" he was in fact borrowing
directly from that author's "The Fall ofthe House of Usher" ( CC 398). Thus we see Eliot
Elliott 23
and Lovecraft hark back to the horror writer in reference to very similar scenes, each
having in mind an effect of shock or terror. If we accept Eliot's connection of the draft
version of "Death by Water" with Ulysses' approach of Purgatory, or take the "long white
line" where "sky and sea should meet" as something cosmic in proportion, then it
becomes clear that both scenes present a terrifying confrontation of an individual with
an imposing manifestation of a divinity that is foreign to them.
It is in the shock and terror involved in this confrontation that the two authors
diverged most from the occult material that they variably drew upon. For the participant
in the occult its portent would undoubtedly be seen as positive, initiation into the
esoteric giving access to ancient wisdom (Surette 7). Yet neither Lovecraft nor Eliot's
texts present us with such optimism. Lovecraft writes early in his tale, "[theosophists]
have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by
a bland optimism" (139). Instead his speaker is met with alien gods, strange and distant
from mankind. Even the name "Cthulhu" is meant to be totally alien: in explaining the
its pronunciation Lovecraft writes in a 1934 letter:
... the word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch
the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. The name of the hellish
entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man's,
hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables
were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence
could never be uttered perfectly by human throats (395)
In the essay "H.P. Lovecraft: Myth-Maker," Dirk Mosig argues that Lovecraft's
"pseudomythology," manifest in his creations' variable re-appearance throughout his
stories, "was not a reaction against his austere and parsimonious materialistic
Elliott 24
philosophy, but instead formed the natural outgrowth of the same" (106). He writes that
the author's "Old Ones" were not simply good or evil but "inimical to man, in the same
way that man would appear to be inimical to ants, should these get in his way" (107).
Eliot, in his manner, introduces a strange god as well, in the form of the Thunder in "V.
What the Thunder Said," lifted from a fable found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
( CPP 54). This is not a cosmically alien deity as in Lovecraft's text, but certainly one
culturally remote from the predominantly Christian Europe of the early 2oth century.
That its remoteness is critically so is made distinct by the violent, grotesque nature of
the lines which precede its introduction, such as "Falling towers I Jerusalem Athens
Alexandria I Vienna London I Unreal" (374-377) and "There is the empty chapel, only
the wind's home. I It has no windows, and the door swings, I Dry bones can harm no
one" (389-391). Notably, in The Waste Land the message of the Thunder is only
accessible through interpretation. It only presents one syllable, "Da," which is the root of
the words "Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" which follow (NCE 18-19).
Respectively meaning "give," "compassion," and "control," their meaning is instructive,
but the inhuman Thunder only sounds "Da." What is more, Eliot does not provide a
translation for any of these terms within the text of the poem, making them appear
entirely alien to the majority of readers not familiar with the ancient language of
Sanskrit. Thus these gods summoned into text by Lovecraft and Eliot were indeed
strange, manifestly foreign and outside of their author's native tradition.
In both cases, though, some biographical knowledge shows that these gods were
actually intimately known by them. In a 1922 essay Lovecraft confesses, "[b]y my
thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man's impermanence and
insignificance, and by my seventeenth ... I had formed in all essential particulars my
Elliott 25
present pessimistic cosmic views" (MW 536). The cosmic horror of Cthulhu was derived
from his own regard of the universe, brought into perspective by his study of astronomy.
Eliot, on his part, had dedicated himself to the study of Sanskrit at Harvard, gaining a
degree of intimacy with Hindu and Buddhist philosophy (Ackroyd 47). The deities in the
"The Call of Cthulhu" and The Waste Land were invoked of their author's own studies,
as if shocked by their own revelation. In each case I would hypothesize that the reaction
in their writings was brought on by the strildng relativity of their knowledge. Contained
in the realization of the vastness of space and time for Lovecraft was the relative
smallness of mankind, and in the investigation of Sanskrit for Eliot there was the
realization that the relative complexity of Indian philosophers made "most of the great
European philosophers look like schoolboys" (After Strange 43). This is not to call the
two men relativists; in fact they were more likely just the contrary. These self-described
classicists exhibited momentous shock at their realizations. A most dramatic example of
this may be seen in Lovecraft's reaction to the eclipse observations which proved
Einstein's general theory of relativity:
.. .it removes the last hold which reality or the universe can have on the
independent mind. All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion - a fly may be
greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass Mount Everest - assuming
them to be removed from the present planet and differently environed in the
continuum of space-time. There are no values in all infinity- the least idea that
there are is the supreme mockery of all. All the cosmos is a jest, and fit to be
treated only as a jest, and one thing is as true as another. (MW 119)
Such a total revaluation of the nature of physical reality shocked Lovecraft into a
heralding in of new gods in his fiction, gods whose existence was beyond prior
Elliott 26
imagination. In a period where reevaluations of this type were multiple, with the
recognition of relative existence of many human beliefs and institutions, occultism and
Darwinian anthropology attempted to find a relief, a hidden unity within a disparate
reality. That Lovecraft as well as Eliot utilized this analogue, in each case in a perverted
form, is understandable. In their works we see a kind of vision within multiplicity,
pointing toward a strange omniscience that has a disruptive revelatory power.
The concept of strange gods appears as something of a motif in both authors'
works. We see this device used additionally by Lovecraft in "Nyarlathotep," "The Other
Gods," and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, among a number other stories, while Eliot
returns to it most distinctly in "Journey of the Magi" and "The Dry Salvages." In
observing these instances it is important to be aware of these two men's theories of
culture, which were in fact quite complementary. In both cases there was an
understanding of different cultures as being fundamentally so, with an individual raised
in one being unable to fully adapt to another. In his aptly titled series oflectures on
"orthodoxy" and "heresy" in literature and culture "After Strange Gods" Eliot states in
regard to "Brahmin and Buddhist thought," that his "only hope of really penetrating to
the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or
a European" (44). In much the same manner Lovecraft wrote in a 1935 essay "Heritage
or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms," that "nothing has value, direction,
meaning, or relevance save in connexion with that fortuitous jumble of experiences,
beliefs, and customs constituting each observer's local inheritance" (MW 191). It is key
to note here that these statements were made only two years apart, thus at roughly the
same point in their careers, in both instances in reference to modern artistic
developments, and with consideration of those concepts associated with the strange
Elliott 27
deities of their earlier writings: the Thunder and Cthulhu. For Eliot the alien impression
he received of Subcontinent writings forms the basis of his assertion, while for Lovecraft
it is the "eternal and indifferent cosmos" that determines "there can be no such things as
value, purpose, direction, or meaning, or even interest, except in a strictly local and
relative sense" (190). Thus in each instance these authors thought of culture neither as
absolute, nor as being so trivial that one could be easily exchanged for another. The
circumstances surrounding an individual's growth and development, as arbitrary as they
may be, were seen as being of primary importance.
A striking example in Lovecraft's fiction of the alien quality impressed upon him
by other cultures, and how that quality was enmeshed with the alien quality of
modernity, may be found in "Nyarlathotep," a 1920 prose poem. This short work telling
of a portentous figure arriving out of Egypt and conducting presentations which
individuals are invariably drawn to, exhibits multiple parallels to Eliot's The Waste
Land. In the first full paragraph of this text, which Lovecraft claimed to have written
before fully waking (CC 369), he creates a distinct sense of both cultural and cosmic
disruption, writing that
The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was
added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger
widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the
most terrible phantasms of the night. (31)
He concludes this paragraph with the summation that "everyone felt that the world and
perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of
gods or forces which were unknown" (31). So here the unrest of human society and
government becomes apiece with that of the material world, evident in the intuitive
Elliott 28
apprehensions of the immediate populace, evoking again the apprehension of strange
gods. The setting of this text is a city, unnamed but evocatively described as "the great,
the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes" (32), thus reflecting the "Unreal City"
invoked in the first and third parts of The Waste Land. The two evoked but unnamed
cities become all the more comparable when considering an earlier draft ofthe poem
beginning with an account of a man wandering a city by night, attempting to get a
prostitute and having an altercation with the police (WLF 5). Eliot even originally used
the word "terrible," as in Lovecraft's text, rather than "unreal" (9). Thus it is clear that
the two texts play with a similar evocation of the city, but all the more significant is the
manner in which Nyarlathotep enters into this city. He is distinctly an outsider, coming
"out of Egypt" and telling that he "had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven
centuries" (31) thus signifying an ancient eastern tradition entering into the west. In this
he serves a somewhat similar role as the Thunder as non-western tradition that enters
The Waste Land, but all the more he calls to mind Madame Sosostris, whose name
likewise is derived from several rulers of ancient Egypt (NCE 40). But Nyarlathotep is
also distinctly modern, at the same time representing recent advances of thought and
technology: "always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them
into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences-of electricity and
psychology-and gave exhibitions of power that sent spectators away speechless" (31).
Thus he at once presents the manifold forces of modernity which critically affected
Lovecraft and Eliot, namely science and the recognition of other cultural traditions, and
enacts a transformation on the populace. After being driven out ofNyarlathotep's
presentation the narrator cannot see the city in the same manner, recounting that
amongst the crowd"[ w ]e sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and
Elliott 29
still alive" (32). The grotesque imagery which follows is of the same kind as that Eliot
uses in "What the Thunder Said" prior to the appearance of the Thunder. In this last
section Eliot invokes:
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal[.] (367-376)
Utilizing much of the same imagery Lovecraft writes "[ w ]hen we gazed around the
horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of
the second tower was ragged at the top," recalling the "falling towers" of Eliot, and upon
entering into the vortex which appears, "half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that
rest on nameless rocks beneath space" (33) evoking same unrealized quality of the "city
over the mountains" which Eliot's speaker cannot grasp. The utter confusion and
ominous quality of these respective passages make for a similarly violent impression on
the reader, and their context appears much the same. "Nyarlathotep" thus encapsulates
the violent reaction to the relativity of modernity exhibited by Eliot and Lovecraft,
organizing this reaction into a distinct narrative form.
Elliott 30
The Cosmic Shore
It is important to keep in mind that for all of the shock of modernity that has
been heretofore illustrated, an understanding of the relativity of individual existence
was not shirked away from by either writer. Lovecraft and Eliot maintained far more
sophisticated relationships with their lmowledge than simple repugnance. For all of the
importance the latter attached to tradition, he was careful to note that tradition was not
"immovable" and warned of the danger of thinking a certain condition of living "capable
of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that
condition in its time" (After Strange 19). Likewise, while Lovecraft wrote in a 1919 essay
that "the world is but a grain of dust in existence for a moment" (MW 138) he did not
resort to despair but upholds the importance of truth in itself, calling it "the only object
worthy of the quest of an enlightened mind" (139). Although expressing shock at relative
existence in their imaginative writings, these two authors accepted and internalized it.
The acknowledgement of a larger and ultimately ungraspable state of existence was just
as much a part of their literature as was the reaction of the individual to it. In his essay
"Lovecraft and the Cosmic Quality in Fiction," Richard Tierney elaborates on what
Lovecraft, in a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as the "cosmic quality"
(L VW 213) in fiction, which he notes "was not primarily an intellectual position nor a
philosophical outlook, but rather, a feeling or mood that could be evoked in rare people
by even rarer passages in literature" (191). In his own words, the author described the
feeling as
the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of
mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space
and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unlmown
infinities and in unknown relationships oftime, space, matter, force,
dimensionality and consciousness. (L VW 213)
Elliott 31
This quality, I will argue, is apparent in Eliot's writing as well as Lovecraft's. As here
Lovecraft asserts that only a "sensitive minority" may experience the sensation, a
passage from Eliot's 1936 "Burnt Norton" maintains "human kind I Cannot bear very
much reality" (44-45). That Four Quartets, the four poems of which this is the first, are
concerned very much with "unknown relationships," may be exemplified in the lines
which follow: "Time past and time future I What might have been and what has been I
Point to one end, which is always present" (46-48). That these poems are at times
religious or mystical in character is no bar from the materialist Lovecraft's
understanding; as Tierney notes, the author in fact "equated the cosmic outlook with
mysticism," in one instance using the phrase "mystic inclination" interchangeably with
the "cosmic quality" (192). In discussing this quality in Eliot I will look primarily at "The
Dry Salvages," the third poem in Four Quartets and perhaps the most similar of all his
writings to those of Lovecraft in terms of thematic content and material. However, I will
first turn to earlier respective examples of this sensibility in "The Fire Sermon" of The
Waste Land and a 1919 prose poem by Lovecraft titled "Memory."
These are two texts that present to the reader post-human spaces, thus calling to
awareness the transience of humankind in the cosmic timeframe. The first stanza of
"The Fire Sermon" begins with images of the natural world, making clear that there is no
human presence in this scene: "The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf I Clutch
and sink into the wet bank. The wind I Crosses the brown land, unheard" (173-175).
That the wind is unheard makes clear that there is absence of people in this scene;
presumably even the speaker is not present. Eliot's passage suggests a desolate
Elliott 32
environment, a "brown land" without foliage. Lovecraft, in "Memory," instead presents
an environment full of foliage in his setting of "the valley of Nis" -which, in the poem by
Poe he borrowed the name from, is said to mean "the valley of unrest" (Poe 72)-writing
that "[r]ank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl"
(MW 30). Yet here too humans are absent; the brief, five paragraph text features
primarily an exchange between "The genie that haunts the moonbeams" and the
"Daemon of the Valley" who calls himself "Memory." Lovecraft describes this foliage as
overturning human ruins made foreign by the passage of time: "twining tightly about
broken columns and strange monoliths, and heaving up marble pavements laid by
forgotten hands." While he presents the ruins of humanity's endeavors in the midst of
an overwhelming flora, Eliot emphasizes the absence of more transient remains in his
waste land: "The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, I Silk handkerchiefs,
cardboard boxes, cigarette ends I Or other testimony of summer nights" (177-179). The
latter poet includes mythical elements in his poem as well, although again in a converse
manner. While for Lovecraft the Genie and the Daemon reside in the human absence,
Eliot's speaker repeatedly declares that "The nymphs are departed" (175, 179). Here
humans are made mythic, rather than myth appearing in their absence as in "Memory,"
and their absence is thus mourned; the speaker declares in this same passage, "[b ]y the
waters of Leman I sat down and wept" (182). "Memory" too contains a sentiment ofloss,
but in a more ambivalent manner. The Daemon here tells the Genie that the beings
which created the ruins which surround them "were like the waters of the river Than,
not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their
aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees," and the text
concludes, "the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling
Elliott 33
courtyard." For the mythical Memory the presence of our species is but of a moment,
and our absence is met not with mourning but with contemplation.
This is not to say that Eliot was any less concerned with the cosmic scale of time
in writing a mourning of human absence. The perspective of his text is concerned with
transience foremost. The title cif this portion of the poem, "The Fire Sermon" is an
allusion to a sermon of Buddha of the same name in which all things are conceived of as
being on fire, a state of chemical reaction which is never static. A translation of this
sermon reads, "mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on
fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in
dependence on impressions received by the mind, that is also on fire" (NCB 54-55). In
this the concern is with the transience of experience itself, not of a species, but this
sentiment lends itself to that of the texts here discussed in that all is, as the daemon
Memory considered mankind, "of the moment." Another allusion in the first stanza of
"The Fire Sermon" appears in the line "But at my back in a cold blast I hear" (185),
which Eliot attributes to Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress" (NCB 23). This
too contributes to the thematic importance of transience, the full statement from which
it was derived reading "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying
near" (North n). This is again concerned with the experience of temporality. If it seems
then that Eliot's speaker mourns the absence of the nymphs, then it is for the poet's
concern with the way in which the cosmic passage of time is experienced by the
individual.
In both Lovecraft and Eliot's respective scenes there is a central river: in
"Memory" the fictional Than and in "The Fire Sermon" the Thames. Rivers make for a
compelling symbol in the illustration of temporality and the cosmic, as they are at once a
Elliott 34
relatively constant force and always in a state of change. Eliot's speaker refrains three
times "Sweet Thames, run softly," imitating the river's constancy and intimating its
changing flow. The Daemon Memory recognizes the river as, like humans, "not to be
understood," for Lovecraft tells us that Than's "waters are slimy and filled with weeds.
From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the Daemon
of the Valley lmows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound." In this the
river it is a particular instance within the cosmos, like human life, that is ineffably
affected by the procession of time.
Something of this conception is apparent in Eliot's 1941 "The Dry Salvages,"
wherein he writes "[t]he river is within us, the sea is all about us" (15). In this later
poem, the individual river is subsisted into the greater and older ocean. The sea
becomes representative of the cosmic scale of time, carrying with it "hints of earlier and
other creation:/ The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone" (18-19). This
understanding of the sea is akin to that exhibited in numerous stories by Lovecraft,
including "The Call of Cthulhu," in which the "earlier and other" Cthulhu sleeps beneath
the ocean. The association of the ocean with deep time is evident as early in Lovecraft's
career as 1917, when he wrote "Dagon," one of his first forays into short fiction as an
adult. In this narrative the protagonist finds himself alone upon an expanse of seabed
that has risen to the surface, "exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years
had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths" ( CC 2). The "innumerable" and
"unfathomable" are arrived at most distinctly in Eliot's contemplations, writing of a
cosmic scale of time in the rhythm of the sea:
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Elliott 35
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women[.] (37-41)
Thus the ground swell, sounding through the tolling bell on the sea, suggests a
constancy of time beyond normal conception, which "is and was from the beginning"
(48). Cogitating on the import of this understanding, Eliot confronts the conventional
constructions of time's progress, writing that with age it seems
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. (87-91)
He finds the past not to be a progression, implying an ever improving condition and an
ever more inferior past. The "superficial notions of evolution" likely refer to its
understanding as a "survival of the fittest" -which Surette, in his discussion of the
Darwinian understanding of history, notes "was reluctantly adopted by Darwin only in
later editions of The Origin of Species" (44) - rather than a survival of the best adapted
to a particular environment. In the latter, more sophisticated understanding, the past is
not seen as a progression so much as being akin to, as Eliot describes earlier in the
poem, "[y ]ears ofliving among the breakage j Of what was believed in as the most
reliable" ( 60-61). Lovecraft had been deceased for several years when "The Dry
Salvages" was published, but one of his last works, the 1935 novel The Shadow out of
Time, evidences that late in life he was concerned with time in much the same manner.
The narrator of this tale describes his experience of having his consciousness exchanged
with a member of a Pre-Cambrian race, which he is only able to recall in dream. Here
Elliott 36
too time is not seen as a progression: we are told a most learned species existed 150
million years ago (362) and that human civilization will be superseded by "the mighty
beetle civilization" (360). Even human intellect, signified by the other minds the "Great
Race" chose to abduct out of time, is shown to be eclectic across history. While held in
the past, the narrator spoke with such far-removed persons as, among others,
Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire ofTsan-Chan, which is to come in
A.D. 5000; with that of a general ofthe great-headed brown people who held
South Mrica in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk
named Bartolomeo Corsi[.] (Dreams in 359)
As did Lovecraft in this instance, Eliot presented a conception of history that is not
progressive, being marked only by change, in "The Dry Salvages," evidencing an
awareness of a deep, cosmic time.
This common awareness is, of course, made possible by the scientific knowledge
available to the two auiliors and their individual understanding of it, but there is
anoilier mutual influence here also. "The Dry Salvages" is, like the three oilier parts of
the Four Quartets, based upon a place of importance to Eliot. He informs the reader in
an introductory note that the poem's title is derived from a rock formation off of the
coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. This city is located in the midst of the country of
Lovecraft's fiction. In the surrounding area of Massachusetts would have been located
his fictional towns of Kingsport ( CC 384-385), Arkham, and Innsmouth ( CC 410) which
appear throughout his fiction. Eliot had in fact intimately known this region, having
spent his summers from 1893 onward with his family in Gloucester, a fishing port off
the Cape Ann coast (Ackroyd 22). Growing up he would have lmown much the same
New England atmosphere as Lovecraft, on whom the area's influence cannot be
Elliott 37
underestimated. In 1927 he wrote of his native city of Providence, located southward
along the seaboard, "that is Old Providence, the town that gave me birth and in which I
have lived all but two of my thirty-six years. I am it, and it is I" (L VW 200 ). Places
!mown familiarly were certainly of the utmost importance to these two writers, and
those along the New England coast quite apparently so. With this knowledge there can
be little doubt that this shoreline provided them with the atmosphere and images with
which to capture the import of a cosmic understanding.
It should come as no surprise then that Eliot also invoked the Dry Salvages in the
draft version of "Death by Water" (WLF 55). Here too nautical images derived from the
coast are invoked in the approach to a strange monument. That the sea delivers the
individual to the marker of a different belief, as it does in the work of Lovecraft, is
reflected in The Dry Salvages when Eliot writes "[t]he sea has many voices, I Many gods
and many voices" (24-25), a line originally intended for "Death by Water" as well (WLF
57). In this phrase the understanding of the sea as representative of the cosmic is further
solidified: the ocean is that in which all of the relative gods exist. Certainly this is the
case in the works of Lovecraft, who demonstrates a multiplicity of gods in the sea quite
literally not only in "The Call of Cthulhu," but also in "Dagon," The Shadow over
Innsmouth, and "The Strange High House in the Mist" among other stories. The Dry
Salvages itself exhibits a multiplicity of gods: in it the river is thought to be a god (1-2),
"Death" is called the god of the bone (85), and Krishna is mused upon by the speaker
(126). If he and Lovecraft were shocked by the portent of relativity, then it was in the
cosmic-the quality of which is elicited by the ocean-that this relativity was possible
and able to occupy their imaginations all the more thoroughly.
Elliott 38
In the fifth segment of The Dry Salvages Eliot highlights the absurdity of
attempting to know the cosmic through superstitious means. He lists in ten lines such
activities as "[t]o report the behavior ofthe sea monster" (189), to "fiddle with
pentagrams" (195), or "[t]o explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams" (198) and concludes
that "these are usual I Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: 1 And always will
be" (198-200). Writing off these falsities, he draws attention to the immense unknown
which surrounds us in space and, most significantly in this poem, time. It cannot go
without notice that such things as he lists here are the material of much of Lovecraft' s
fiction. That Lovecraft did not believe in them there can be little doubt, though, as he
writes them off wholesale in just the same manner as Eliot in a letter to a superstitious
reader shortly before his death. In this 1937 epistle he directs this fan to a number of
scientific texts and concludes:
But don't think that I'm not interested in fantastic speculations about the
universe and life, even if I don't believe them. Indeed, they are all the more
interesting-like the shadowy dreams I write about in my weird stories-because
I don't believe them. (MW 520)
For Lovecraft such speculation was ripe for imaginative inspection, allowing a means for
writing about the unknown, which was his concern. He in fact began his expansive essay
"Supernatural Horror in Literature" by stating, "[t]he oldest and strongest emotion of
mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (25).
Eliot, in the second part of his poem, touches upon something of the same idea; he
invokes "[t]he backward look behind the assurance I Of recorded history, the backward
half-look I Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror" (103-105). That here he
invokes a "primitive terror" in the unknown past, which recorded history can only
Elliott 39
attempt to explain for us, makes it clear that he identified the horror of that which
cannot be understood in just the same manner as Lovecraft. All the more intriguing in
this respect, though, is a particular passage near the end of the poem:
Here past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement-
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. (221-228)
Although this is a strildngly elusive passage, the speaker appears to locate a driving force
behind perpetual movement in "daemonic, chthonic / Powers." In this Eliot seems to
again associate, like Lovecraft, the horrific with the unknown, signified by the daemonic
and the chthonic. The latter of these signifies "dreaded deities of the underworld" in
Greek myth ("Chthonic" 41) and is striking in its similar spelling to Lovecraft's
"Cthulhu"2 • All of this considered, we can see Lovecraft and Eliot reflect one another in
the manner in which they are affected with a certain terror at the unknown cosmos.
Thus it seems that their corresponding shock at the relativity unveiled by modern
knowledge derives from their inability to know it, to comprehend it as familiar. This is
not to say that they shirked away from relativity or the cosmic: although classicists by
nature they each adamantly attempted to understand the new perspective granted them.
The Dry Salvages, like The Waste Land before it, is not a condemning poem but a
2 This particular is curious. as although he provided his own alien etymology, it is hard to imagine that Lovecraft, who claimed to have learned the Greek alphabet in his youth (MW 534), would not have been aware of the similarity. Perhaps this was a source for the name which he did not share, or was not aware of himself.
Elliott 40
thoughtful one. The passages of shock and horror are part of a more intricate
exploration of ideas. Similarly, the supernatural horror of Lovecraft's writing is but a
means toward exploring the vast cosmos which so fascinated him. Although their texts
may seem to reproach modernity, they are rather reacting to the realization that the
world of the generations that came before them was falling apart in the wake of a much
grander conception beyond simple comprehensibility. The world we live in is formed of
this conception, and it cannot be abandoned. We are now thoroughly modern, and for
that reason we should listen to these voices bound in books: the larger world which Eliot
and Lovecraft realized is ours now, and we may yet benefit from their musings.
Elliott 41
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Elliott 42
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